Hi, I'm back. Bugs.

[meo]

Hunting areas can break the game with 99 items.

But more importantly, the_roth just beat an Arena Coloseum in the game and it crashed when leaving the arena to return to the main area.

Also, when he left another time all his equipment was missing. I suspect Equipment Break might have done it, but I thought your main party didn't go into the arena. I thought you had a 'double' of your party that went in. Why did it strip his characters outside the arena?

[meo]

Journal says Miyagi is in Dale, but on the world map he's in Sumi. I think Dale got changed to Sumi without an update.

You can find his recorded video here, if you want. He's been streaming it for a week or two.

www.twitch.tv/the_roth/b/582462060

[DJC]

I haven't tracked down the hunting area item bug yet, but it's probably an oversight in rushed code.

The Arena has always had problems, I've rewritten the code before, but I'm starting to suspect it's a result of the loop bug in the engine rather than the logic. In the next update I'm going to try one more attempt using go to labels. I didn't use hero doubles since that would break some established code. It's the normal heroes with their stats adjusted and restored afterward. On rare occasions an infinite loop is created or a stat becomes stubbornly fixed to a set value. I've never seen equipment loss before.

The Journal, like Miyagi's Tactics and the Character Book, all contain outdated information. It's a pain to revise because pictures are used rather than text.

I was working on a major new update that would employ DynRPG plugins to fix the last major issues with the game, but I ran out of steam trying to include all the plot and character additions I've cut from previous releases.

Thanks for the bug report, though, and the's very cool someone is twitch casting the game!

[meo]

Thanks for the response! By the way, I think I discovered something strange.

I noticed when he left the arena that his characters had around 999 attack each. Which was strange, considering they weren't before he went in. They were in the 400-500 range.

The likeliest solution I can figure out is this:

When you use a potion that gives Might prior to entering the arena, it doubles your attack value. When you go in, this is saved. When you fight your first battle, you lose your might.

But when you leave the arena, you're restored back to what your pre-arena attack value was and the Might is gone. Which means your attack is permanently doubled.

Is this theory correct? Is this a super gamebreaking bug?

[DJC]

When entering the arena, hero equipment is removed as well as conditions before memorizing stats. This is to prevent exactly the bug you're describing. Looking at the code, however, only negative conditions are removed, allowing Might, Focus, or Protect to persist and cause faulty numbers to be saved for base stats. I thought I corrected this in a previous version, but maybe I was waiting until I rewrote the entire code again. Players could indeed exploit this to easily maximize some stats. Obviously not my intention and it will be fixed in the next update.

[meo]

So, after extensive testing (in order to try and figure out how to abuse the bug), Roth and I seem to have figured out what causes the crashes at the arena.

If you're alright, the arena lets you leave normally. If you're not, it slowly fades out as if the game is struggling to keep up with something to a black screen and then hardlocks.

At first we thought it was because he was trying to go over 999 stats, but that wasn't it. We thought Glen was glitched out, that wasn't it. The only thing that changed pre-crash and post-crash, we figured out, was the fact that he crafted equipment at Watts Forge to equip.

It seems like the Double Edge, the weapon that allows Glen and Justin to attack twice, results in an arena crash for some reason. It might be other equipment too. Any idea why this happens? Can you recreate it using the same equipment he's wearing when the game crashes after leaving the arena?

www.twitch.tv/the_roth/b/583084898

It begins before 2:50:00, but starting there works just as well. The party being used there involves Justin, also using a Double Edge, so it shows the game will crash if Justin or Glen are in the party.

[DJC]

The game struggling is the stat restore function looping without end. I intentionally designed it so that if the restored stats did not match the initial values, the game would freeze and prevent exploitation. Allowing the function to run multiple times also sometimes corrects errors where the first pass fails to revert stats correctly. When that many commands are executed without a wait, sometimes the engine just drops them.

Crafting equipment at either forge should have no effect on the arena, there are no shared variables or switches.

The Double Edge should not have an effect on the stat restoration process either. The only unique attributes that weapon possesses is the attack twice and two hand requirement, but the game consistently interprets that when saving equipment slots. You can try equipping Keen with Tornado Teeth, an identical weapon except for the character, animations, and sword rather than axe attribute. I'm predicting it won't cause a freeze. If you want to test specific equipment you'll have to use only one piece at a time.

I've had issues with specific characters before, but they've been isolated to that particular save file. A previous player always experienced a freeze with Meredith in the party. For no apparent reason one of the variables tracking her attributes would automatically set to a number different from the actual value. If you want to send me the save file in question, I can test it and attempt to recreate the bug.